Caring for and protecting those whom and that which we love, we sentient, big-brained beings are doing what comes naturally. Yet as I look around me, beyond the sublime comfort of my tender life, I see that neither luxury nor hardship in themselves provide either inner peace or a life without violent exchanges.
Dancing as I do, straddling the masculine/feminine teeter-totter, I try over and again to understand and find some peace with the constant tug between knowing the One and experiencing the toll of dualism.
We humans have great powers of abstract thought and the ability to objectify. Our ways of coming to understand and even control our physical universe through science are astounding. What a piece of work is man! In order to build our kingdoms and corporations, to gather power for one country over another, one religion against the neighboring faith, we have all decided to pretend to believe that numbers on a balance sheet and printed rectangles with assigned values shall be our organizing principle. Money as power.
The cost to each of us of this grand game of pretend too often goes unremarked upon. Makes sense. It would be distressing and, ultimately, at least irritating to have some young voice calling out about the Emperor's nakedness all the time. But still ...
It may well be that my coming of age in the 1960's gave me the illusion of some seismic changes coming down. Perhaps every young person's coming of age feels like this --- that we come to herald our elders with songs of peace and equal rights, our cheers of "Make love, not war!" just our colorful way of decorating the downward path to adulthood. But be that so, can we not rally the wisdom of our youth, be we 14 or 44 or 84? All youth requires is education, where the wonder of our minds meets history and ethics and poetry.
Though I may come to understand why African warriors fear the changes that are coming as the children, and most especially the girls, are getting educated, my understanding does not bring peace to my troubled mind. The men of Boko Harem were once baby boys. Robert Oppenheimer and all the workers on the Manhattan Project once were baby boys as well. All grew to learn to think abstractly, even to the point of seeing their fellow humans as property to be sold and enemies to destroy.
These realities I cannot meditate away. What I can do is to Evoke the One in word and deed, to celebrate connection, to affirm unity, and to question my own thinking and speaking, even as I challenge others to raise their own questions, their own assumptions and hold these up to the light where we can find the strength to challenge dominant ways of thinking, and move closer to peace.
In the late 60's, striving for peace, I joined others on the Stanford campus and through peaceful sit-ins and ongoing peer education, we succeeded at getting the University to divest itself of SRI, for the Institute was actively developing weapons for the Vietnam War. The recent movement to get Stanford to further divest, this time to rid their huge portfolios of investments supporting the fossil fuel industry, matter, especially as we are further educated. The pundits who declaim that these are meaningless gestures because the system is built to follow the money, Stanford be damned, are the people who can drop their plastic water bottle along the trail because "What's one bottle, anyway?"
How we look at our world, from moment to moment, creates our world. We with our gift of abstract thought are all held by an infinitely more powerful force, for we are All and all we have. Today I rededicate myself to peace through understanding. Namasté, dear reader.